Personal freedom is having the means to live life in the most fulfilling way possible.
A fulfilling life will be different for all of us, but dedication to the four following categories will point us all in the right direction.
Pursue Personal Freedom through Lifestyle Design and discover a life of happiness.
Deciding to pursue Personal Freedom is a commitment. It’s like deciding to get out of debt, or to get back in shape.
But there’s more to Personal Freedom then being debt free, or in shape.
Pursuing Personal Freedom DOES include becoming financially independent, AND reaching a desirable physical condition, but it also means A LOT more. Conceptually, move a few thousand feet higher to get a better look at life.
While looking at your life from the 30,000-foot view, see if you can notice all the interconnections. Can you see how the money influences your stress which influences relationships which influences your motivation to use your body which influences your feelings of self-worth which influences confidence to resolve problems, and on, and on?
To pursue Personal Freedom means to recognize those interdependencies and dedicate attention to the little factors that will yield the highest return.
Somewhere within the following four categories you will find the starting place, but there’s one little catch.
You have to know where you want to go.
Think about the last time someone asked you this, or the last time you had this conversation with your spouse, or the last time you wrote this down in your journal. Yet, it’s probably the most important question to reflect on:
Where am I going?
What do I want life to look like this time next year? In five years? Ten years?
What is my life goal?
The answers to all of those questions can change with time, but to start down the path of Personal Freedom you have to know an answer to all of them today.
Money
Money is the scapegoat for most people on the path to Personal Freedom. For good reason!
The majority of us, self-included, spend our precious time working toward someone else’s objectives in exchange for money to spend on our preferred way of life.
In our own defense, we are brow beat from day one that this is the way life is. It takes major re-programming to come around to the idea that we can spend our time exactly how we desire, but it may take a little (or a lot) of creativity to figure out how to make enough money to sustain our preferred way of life.
I need to make two important points:
- Your ‘Preferred’ way of life needs to be what YOU decide. It doesn’t matter how anyone else lives their life. You need to get brutally honest with yourself and figure out what this looks like for YOU.
- This is not a new idea. People are out there traveling the world making 6 figures because they got creative. Find the niche that is your dream, search hard to find someone doing what you want to do and study the PROCESS they used to get where they are. Then apply your own creativity to make your own story and live your own life.
You probably need less money to live a happier life then you think.
For fear this isn’t totally clear to the uninitiated, this doesn’t mean NOT working for some mega-business. It means making the conscious decision that you WANT to be employed at (Amazon) for SPECIFIC reasons.
The end game for Personal Freedom with regard to money is to have the monetary resources to spend your time on activities that generate the highest level of personal fulfillment.
Health
If there is a key to living a long life, it is to take care of our health.
Personal Health is really a complex combination of:
- Diet – the first modern paradox. Amid an endless supply of food we are (arguably) the most unhealthy we’ve ever been as a society.
- Exercise – fads don’t work, and humans didn’t evolve in a gym. Our lifestyle needs to naturally invoke using the body. Concentration on muscle groups will vary with the season.
- Mindfulness – Almost wholly overlooked in modern society. Like all skills, if we don’t exercise our brain we lose capacity, this comes in both the form of reading and learning skills and meditative practices, which don’t have to be “meditation”.
It seems that we (again, self-included) can get wrapped around the axle with exercise fads and diets that work moderately well for a short time. Regardless of your impression of your own state of health, the best way to get on a path to healthy freedom is to implement systems into your daily life to pursue and maintain the condition you need.
For example: meditate in the morning, exercise at lunch, and eat only things that are not, and cannot be white, six days a week.
Hold that system for eternity and eternity will be long.
The end game of Personal Freedom with regard to Health is being unhindered by physical or mental fitness to pursue the activities that bring the most joy to life.
If there’s one thing that leads to a life of HAPPINESS, it’s satisfaction within the mind body connection.
Resilience
A one-word catch-all to describe having the ability to take care of ourselves.
The image it conjures is someone suffering a setback, yet persevering. To be strong.
This is the opportunity to focus on the physical domain. How we utilize the things around us to provide strength to our lives, rather than suffer from them. This includes:
- The Home or Domicile – having the ability and courage to respond to problems in the structure we live saves us time and money and exercises the muscle to troubleshoot and resolve issues.
- Auto – Understanding how your automobile works will hasten awareness to rising issues which may serve to save lives, let alone time and money.
- Property – an underutilized resource no matter the plot size. Short of rental property, your land holds the greatest potential for recouping the money spent in ownership.
The end game of Personal Freedom with regard to Resilience is having the skills and knowledge to address problems that arise in life, or at least the confidence to try.
Relationships
Social Capital holds the highest potential for return on investment over any other form.
The term ‘Networking’ feels cheesy. This isn’t networking, though I do support that ditty that it’s not what you know in life, it’s who you know. Even that sounds self-centered. Relationships are something else.
Relationships are the social connections where we truly share ourselves with other people. That honest connection.
Foster the relationships in which we don’t judge one another, and where we welcome the honest feedback and aren’t reserved about having the hard conversations.
The second modern paradox; in this day and age when we are MOST connected, our HONEST relationships have never been worse. Social Media, like Facebook, is the highlight reel. It is with those who we have the TRUE relationships where we share the highlights, and everything else.
The relationships that truly matter will require continuous attention and hard effort. Start with yourself and work out to your spouse or partner, then your children and then your community. Your family should be your community, and your community should be your family.
The end game of Personal Freedom with regard to Relationships is an open and honest engagement with the people who you spend the most time with and strong, mutual connections with people who can help each other on the journey to a fulfilling life.
They Are All Connected
This is not a simple concept. I’ve tried to explain it succinctly, but each of these four categories, and all the subcategories, really warrant dedicated reflection.
If I’m so fortunate that this may help you, when you do reflect on your budget, or your property, or your connection with your spouse, I hope you discover how deeply connected each one is to everything else. This can be difficult to grasp fully, but the blessing is that by focusing to improve one function of your incredibly complex life, you should also be improving all the others in some unique way.
My mission with this website, New Hampshire Man, is to provide ideas and encouragement for you to take control of your life. Not because you have to, but because you WANT to. Most people will stay on the hamster wheel they’ve been handed, they will stay a slave to the system, they will think they are happy, but will accomplish nothing of any significance with their life. That’s fine, but New Hampshire Man is here for those of us who wake up to the idea that life is truly a unique opportunity to be spectacular.
Man, I hope this helps someone out. If this resonates, be sure to check out the next logical step, which is Lifestyle Design. As well as all the conventional requests: leave a comment, join the email newsletter and spread the word.
